zdl_cryptofandomcom-20200214-history
Ethereum Classic (ETC)
Basics * A fork of Ethereum after the hard-fork that was implemented by Ethereum to deal with the DAO hack. * From Token Tuesdays (25-9-2019): "Ethereum was said to have been proposed in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin. Shortly thereafter, the Ethereum Foundation hosted one of the very first Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) in which reports have suggested that around $18.3M worth of ETH was sold in exchange for 31,000 BTC in July of 2014. At the time, 60M of the 72M ether was sold to investors as part of the pre-mine when the network went live in 2015. Sources have claimed that the original conversion rate was set as low as $0.10/ETH. In the following year, a security malfunction written in The DAO’s smart contracts allowed hackers to steal over $50M worth of ETH during a poster child offering in late 2016. This resulted in the creation of a new primary Ethereum blockchain (the one we all know today) in which the hack was reversed alongside Ethereum Classic, in which the hack was never reversed." * Protocol Layer, the base blockchain for the Ethereum Classic ecosystem, including all its tokens, network layers and application layers. * There are 3 main clients: the nominally canonical “Classic-Geth” client (in Golang), Parity Labs’ eponymous software (in Rust) and IOHK’s Mantis in Scala. * Two hard fork network upgrades have taken place in the ETC network — ECIP-1010 to remove the “difficulty bomb” and ECIP-1017 to institute a supply cap with asymptotic supply curve. * Coincap: none. UPDATE: the supply got capped with a hard fork (2017). 51% attacks * Many threats have been made by ETH redditors and also more well known miners that they would try a 51% attack on the ETC chain. So far, none of these threats have been acted out (8-2018) * Has been 51% attacked around 1-2019, Coinbase suspended ETC. There is no sign this attack was connected to the threats of 2017 though. Double spends did happen. Hard Forks Atlantis * Had a succesfull hard fork on 12-9-2019. "Previously slated for this summer, Atlantis was postponed over disagreements, particularly over EIP 170." * According to a release by Ethereum Classic Labs, 10 Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) were included in Atlantis to improve stability and performance and add opcodes, precompiled contracts, zk-SNARKs and enhanced security. * Afri Schoedon was the hard fork coordinator. ETC Labs worked with Chainsafe System and ETC Cooperative, among other community members, on the hard fork. * Speaking with CoinDesk, ETC Lab’s CEO Terry Culver said Atlantis signals a desire to work with ethereum. Many of Atlantis’ EIPs have been on ethereum for years and should allow for more crossover between the platforms, especially for dapps. Agharta * From CoinDesk (13-1-2020): "Similar to the network’s last backwards-incompatible upgrade in September, Atlantis, Agharta makes ethereum classic more interoperable with sister-chain ethereum. As part of the hard fork, the Constantinople and St. Petersburg upgrades deployed in tandem on the ethereum network last February will be enabled under Ethereum Classic Improvement Proposal (ECIP) 1056. Client diversity declining: “The client diversity problem on ETC is in the opposite direction [[ETH]], with Parity-Ethereum dominating,” Summerwill said in the ethereum AllCoreDevs Gitter channel. “Geth Classic is being deprecated and won't be supported after this pending fork, and it looks like most node operators are taking the advice and migrating off. At time of writing, ethereum classic has 252 Parity Ethereum clients, 167 Geth Classic, 80 Multi-Geth and 1 Besu for a total of 500 clients. Ethereum classic developers, including Summerwill, expect the Multi-Geth and Besu clients to fill the gap. '' ''Afri Schoedon, release manager at Parity Technologies and ethereum classic hard fork coordinator, told CoinDesk that client centralization is a small concern given the state of Geth Classic and available alternatives. Schoeden said Geth Classic has hardly been updated since its launch in 2016, leading to the deprecation.” Dev Teams Development * At present (12-2018) most informal community discussion takes place on ETC’s Discord server, with ECIPs themselves posted on the nominated Github account (ethereumclassic) following a power struggle and takeover of the previous canonical Github account (ethereumproject), ostensibly related to the situation with ETCLabs. * When ETCdev ceased operation, the hitherto canonical client Classic-Geth written in Golang stopped being reliably maintained. ETCLabs Core maintains Multi-Geth but not all stakeholders in the ETC ecosystem are currently comfortable using their software given their ostensible desire to have an independent ECLIPimprovement proposal pathway which appears more hard-fork than soft-fork oriented. DCG * Barry Silbert was partly responsible for the creation. Grayscale Investments, a Digital Currency Group company, launched ethereum classic after the DAO hack scandal. * Is therefor also one of the investments chosen by Grayscale, owned by DCG (Grayscale also owns 1% of the BTC supply) The Ethereum Cooperative * The foundation (partly) responsible for the development of Ethereum Classic, is now a 501© non profit based in the USA. * Supports ChainSafe according to their website (as of 9-2019). Team * Bob Summerwill ETC Cooperative Executive Director (he was instrumental in founding the Enterprise ETH Alliance, was involved in the Ethereum Foundation, was a senior figure at Consensys.) "Summerwill is tasked with community building and ongoing technological upgrades, such as the PoA testnet and peaceBridge, the latter allowing movement between the ETH and ETC ecosystems." * Yaz Khoury; director of developer relations Investors * DCG/Grayscale and DFG fund ETC Cooperative. Since 2017, Grayscale has donated a total of $1.1 million, including $338,000 in 2019, to the cooperative. And it announced (22-1-2020) it will fund them for 2 more years. ETCDEV * Defunct, used to do ETC development, Emerald application development framework and tools, Orbita sidechains. * A leading Ethereum Classic, ETCDEV, development entity has shut down (3-12-2018) its operations; in a tweet from the ETCDEV announced that the company will halt development as a result of failure to raise enough funds and a market price crash; on the 2nd of December, the team at ETCDEV had asked the ETC community if they would be willing to help fund operations where 59% answered "no". The ETCDEV team maintains Classic Geth, the main client for the ETC blockchain. Also contributed to original projects, such as Emerald to help others develop on the ETC blockchain, Emerald Wallet for end users, and SputnikVM as a standalone, modular, embeddable and IoT ready EVM. * After the collapse of ETCdev, another entity “ETCLabs” was formed, a new developer team “ETCLabs Core” with significant overlap of personnel. "Some community members have described the sequence of events as a corporate takeover attempt, others do not seem so worried." ETCLabs * Is a for-profit company with VC/Startup and core development activities funded by DFG, DCG, IOHK and Foxconn. * After the collapse of ETCdev, another entity “ETCLabs” was formed, a new developer team “ETCLabs Core” with significant overlap of personnel. "Some community members have described the sequence of events as a corporate takeover attempt, others do not seem so worried." Team * Terry Culver; CEO IOHK * Hoskinson, Charles; dev team, his IOHK team that works on ETC can be viewed here * Charles Hoskinson supposedly is a dev for ETC. He is the founder of IOHK and subsequently Cardano and the Cardano Foundation. Hoskinson has a long history as a blockchain entrepreneur. He was initially the CEO of Ethereum before being fired. Reasons of the firing are complicated. Ethereum at the time was 6 months old with a $15 million market cap. * Hoskinson then founded IOHK and IOHK subsequently led the development of Ethereum Classic. Ethereum Classic came to be when Ethereum hard forked after the major DAO hack. A small portion of the community was against this idea and maintained the original chain, which is now known as Ethereum Classic. For IOHK to lead the development of Ethereum Classic suggests that Hoskinson might have some bad blood with members of the Ethereum Foundation, likely from earlier disagreements that resulted in his ousting. * While IOHK continues to lead Ethereum Classic’s development, its primary focus is now on Cardano. There has been resistance to adopt an on-chain treasury as proposed by IOHK, some stakeholders see this as inherently centralising. Category:Coins/Tokens